You Know What’s Murder? Politics Is Murder

Do anti-abortion activists really think abortion is murder? Or is their opposition merely an expression of their broad discomfort with modern sexual and gender mores? . . .

If you look at actions, rather than words, it just doesn’t add up. Lots of people oppose abortion, but with very few exceptions, they very plainly don’t react to it the same way they react to a genuine murder. Their emotional response gives the game away, even if they’ve convinced themselves otherwise intellectually.

[Rep. Steve] DesJarlais [a pro-life politician who, it was recently revealed, encouraged his then-wife to have two abortions] is a good example. If he had encouraged the murder of two children—real murder, of kids who were a year or two old—he wouldn’t merely be having a tough primary. Regardless of whether he had managed to avoid conviction for his acts, he wouldn’t even be able to run for office, let alone be even odds to win. He’d be a pariah. That’s how people react to actual killing. But it’s not how they react to encouraging abortion.

I think there’s a real point here – but not the point that Drum thinks. It’s not that abortion opponents don’t really care about abortion as such, but only about sexual mores, but that political language is necessarily corrupt because its purpose is pornographic in the sense that it is intended to provoke action, not increase understanding.

So let’s be a bit more flexible in our language if we actually want to understand. “Murder” is categorically unjustified and deliberate homicide. But there are lots of other kinds of killing out there. There’s negligent homicide. There’s manslaughter. There’s justified killing – killing in self-defense, for example. There’s killing in war. Then there’s the killing of non-human animals – routine killing for food as well as the routine extermination of a variety of pests.

The shorthand way you say, “that kind of killing is just wrong” is to call it murder. As in “meat is murder” or “hey, hey, LBJ; how many kids did you kill today?” Or, for that matter, “abortion is murder.” Saying that doesn’t mean that you intend to treat everyone associated with the act as if they were literal murderers. It means you want to awaken people’s consciences to the fact that, if they really thought about the situation, they’d see that murder is not an inapt description. It means you want to change the world so that, one day, slaughtering a pig, or carpet-bombing a city, or having an abortion would be seen, socially, as an abominable act.

I know a man whose mother, when in the late stages of terminal cancer, wanted to commit suicide, and enlisted his aid to achieve her goal. Which he gave her. His actions were illegal in the jurisdiction in which they were committed. He’s clearly, at a minimum, an accessory to a killing; depending on what he did (I declined to learn the details), you might argue that he’s guilty of murder – under existing law, not some hypothetical future law. Am I obliged either to conclude that I have no problem whatsoever with assisted suicide, and be an advocate for changing the law, or to treat him as I would treat O.J. Simpson? Why? Who made that rule, and whose authority compels me to follow it?

Do some animal welfare advocates really believe that killing animals for food is murder? Maybe not – but clearly some of them really do believe that killing animals for food is profoundly unjustified killing, and that the conditions under which animals are killed in modern industrial agriculture are especially evil. That doesn’t make them hypocrites if they stay friends with meat-eaters.

Do some opponents of American foreign policy really believe that the Iraq War amounted to the “murder” of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians? Maybe not – but clearly many of them really do believe that the war was profoundly unjustified, that those deaths should be on the conscience of every American, and that we must radically change our ways and make national amends for committing a heinous crime. That doesn’t make them hypocrites if they debate on civil terms with people who see things much more hawkishly.

Do some opponents of abortion really believe that it is murder, as in, no different from breaking into your neighbor’s house and taking an axe to her children? I doubt it. But clearly some of them really do believe that abortion is profoundly unjustified killing – heck, plenty of people who are pro-choice have moral qualms about abortion, at least in some circumstances, qualms that have nothing to do with panic about women having too much sex and everything to do with worries about encouraging a cavalier attitude toward nascent life. And they aren’t hypocrites if they stay on good terms with people who have had abortions, or encouraged their partners to do so.

Of course, if they have no reaction at all, are completely unfazed by the revelation that somebody who they thought of as being profoundly opposed to abortion turns out to have gotten multiple women pregnant and then encouraged them to abort, well, that would say something. But there’s a whole spectrum of plausible reactions that are consistent even with believing that abortion is categorically wrong – in and of itself, and not as a proxy for disapproval of the behavior that led to pregnancy.

To me, the story about Rep. DesJarlais (assuming the summary above is accurate – I know nothing about him) says little about the sincerity of the beliefs of those who oppose abortion. It says a great deal, though, about the corrupting effects of partisan politics on moral crusades, something I’ve harped on before in this space. I really, really do believe that the more seriously you take the proposition that abortion is categorically immoral, the more morally imperative it is for you not to hitch your wagon to the star of either political party. Nothing is more corrupting of the anti-abortion cause than its subsumption into a culture war that is fundamentally – fundamentally – about making it easier for politicians to get re-elected.

I recognize that, as someone who does not vote pro-life, that position may sound self-serving. But I assure you: though I may be wrong, it’s what I actually do believe.

MORE IN CULTURE

Hide 14 comments

14 Responses to You Know What’s Murder? Politics Is Murder

All this is nice and well if we were discussing abortion in a philosophy seminar, but abortion in the US is an inherently political problem. As such, your column is a kind of evasion I think: nearly all Americans agree that the killing of animals should be legally allowed even if it is unethical, but that randomly shooting people should be both illegal and is immoral. The question of assisted suicide is an open question. The problem with abortion politics is however, that even if you accept the logic that it is one of a vast set of killings, and feeling that it is a killing does not imply you must treat as murder as a question of law, you are still left with a question of public policy: what kind of killing abortion is, and to what extent should it be sanctioned under the law? In a democracy, partisan politics, imperfect tool as they might be, are the only arena where such questions can be settled.

That’s absolutely true. But the problem is that your country hasn’t resolved the question through partisan politics. It’s resolved it – or at least, decided it – through the courts.

I think that’s a very bad way to deal with highly contested moral issues like this one, because it creates a winner-takes-all situation in which the ‘losers’ are half the country. Even though in this case I agree with the court’s decision on its merits.

In rather self serving typical fashion the author introduces two separate and binds them together without any links whatsoever, but just to be provocative (in my view). Pregnancy is the result of relations, but it is not relations. And there isn’t any discomfort as one gets when one has a queasy stomach. There is a valid concern that the more’s are leading to unwanted children and the response to that inconvenience is to kill an innocent child.

There’s no queasy mystery here. Because it doesn’t matter what the more are that leads to the murder of a child in the womb, that child is entitled to protection.

Since pregnancy does not always result from said relational behavior, it remains a separate issue.

In short what the author is contending (in my view) is that Christians don’t like having relations and they hiding their frigidity behind protecting children in the womb.

And he basis his conclusion on the emotional import of the matter. In other words, if one responds emotionally to protecting children in the womb, they are really against modern relational expression.

Excuse me — laugh . . . laugh and laughing.

So those who have an emotional import about the choice to engage in homosexual expression and marriage of the same, must in reality be crazed relational child molesters hiding behind marriage to adopt kids to molest. A bit long but it makes as much sense.

Excuse my emotional response, I am sure if I ever get married and have relations, I will so engage in every pleasure available to me modern and old school within the frame d decency. And I will do so with my wife, who will be female from birth, with a uterus, fallopian tubes and all the rest. And in each morning, or evening whenever the twain shall so indulge with Christ’s full blessings. I will condemn abortion as murder ad will contend to end it — in spite of what appropriate expression and pleasures my wife and I had experienced.

First, a child in development in a woman’s womb is not her body. To the extent that the child is a separate entity — it is not her body. Maybe a course in physical properties might be helpful.

As a separate human being, it is my firm belief that that child is entitled to protection despite the bizarre antics of the 1973 Supreme Court to disqualify the child from said protection because it was not a person of the US.

I am pro life. When I get married it is my sincere hope that I will please my wife in any way she so desires that I can bear. And she may expose me to whatever, films, pictures, writings or arguments she may need to win my assent and eagerness to do so.

I do have deep feelings of disgust about murdering children. I don’t have any about engaging in what is Christ given to enjoy, procreate, relieve stress in matrimonial relations. I think I can argue for most Christians that the premise is as foolish as the overall argument and leaks of logical fallacy and generalization even an unprivileged dolt as myself sees through to insult. Excuse if my emotion betrays my true motive of objecting to such nonsense.

As a practical matter, if women don’t want children there are simple solutions:

1. don’t engage in relations in which potential pregnancy is the result. Often referred to as celibacy or abstinence.

2. If you find yourself so incapable of self control, then by all means prevent pregnancy, it is your body, and I would that you have full control over it – including your desires for fluid exchange.

3. Upon find yourself unable to exercise self control — by your own contraceptive – minus any that kill children in the womb.

I have my view on when relational expression should be engaged, but Christ allows one to choose. As long as your choice does not involve me — I fully support your right to do whatsoever you will with whomever. But I will advocate for protecting children in the US in or out of the womb, even from their careless self obsessed parents.

My emotional state notwithstanding or to import on the matter. After all I am not a woman nor among that crowd who has made it policy, “that if a woman feels, it must be true . . .” The posit on emotive cause is the tool of liberals — hence the noted reference and the continued emotional complaint by homosexual practitioners that my opposition to same sex marriage hurts their feelings and is therefore unconstitutional racist bigotry.

Please keep your emotive analysis in the liberal barrel where it belongs. No doubt you will conclude given my response emotional or not — that I must be in the closet, a bigot, or self hating racist. If it was a new accusation, I might be upset by it.

This is a great post. One of the many frustrating aspects of the abortion debate is how many of my fellow pro-choice liberals think that all the talk of fetal life is just so much window dressing for sexism or conservative sexual mores. I do think that people who go around saying that abortion, or meat, or war, is “murder” are doing a real disservice to the level of the debate and perhaps their own causes. I deplore cruelty to animals, but saying “factory farming is profoundly morally troubling…” seems far more conducive to winning hearts and minds than shouting “Meat is murder!”

“Do some opponents of abortion really believe that it is murder, as in, no different from breaking into your neighbor’s house and taking an axe to her children? I doubt it.”

As someone who is pro-life, I do happen to believe that abortion is murder. But the reason that many people who are pro-life may not believe that abortion is murder is that abortion is legal and millions of women, maybe even women who they know, have had abortions. As morally controversial as abortion is, it still doesn’t have the same social opprobrium that murder of “born” people does. I would be very uncomfortable being around a woman who had an abortion and was not repentant about it. But I would be much, much more uncomfortable being around a person who had murdered a “born” person and was not repentant about it, maybe even if he or she was repentant about it. Most pro-life people, including me, believe that doctors and nurses who perform abortions have committed a more sinful act than the women who get the abortions themselves. There is a case to be made that women who get abortions aren’t guilty of outright murder, because they never saw their unborn babies before having them killed. This is why the advent of ultra-sound has caused the abortion rate to significantly decrease. But even with ultra-sound, mothers-to-be still don’t see their unborn babies in all their God-given human glory. Women who get abortions often, maybe even usually, are in a distressed mental and emotional state. So these women may not be in their right mind, just like most people who commit suicide.

@Wes, That’s fine and dandy, but Kevin’s point is here you have an elected representative that presumably believed (or at least had no difficulty convincing people that he believed) that abortion is murder pressuring his wife and girlfriend to get abortions and getting reelected by those same pro-life people. It’s one thing to say, “Oh they don’t know any better,” and it’s another for the person chanting, “hey, hey, LBJ; how many kids did you kill today?” right after clocking out of the Agent Orange factory and not getting called out on it.

The argument that people are hypocrites and therefore the entire cause and it’s members must also be so. Isn’t much further than smearing.

The current wh executive said no interventions — he was elected largely on that promise.

Just a glimpse at national news for the last six years indicates no small level of hypocrisy. I would be hard pressed to call all democrats, liberals and others who so voted hypocrites, unless they too are being hypocritical in supporting the 180 on those promises. whether the reason for the turn is political or self serving pandering.

Excuse my lousy proof reading in my earlier post — it is my thorn in the flesh it seems.

“But I would be much, much more uncomfortable being around a person who had murdered a “born” person and was not repentant about it, maybe even if he or she was repentant about it.”

I would uncomfortable in either case. killing another human being minus self defense is a strange turn. And I might even be more uncomfortable with someone who has killed a child in the womb, despite the discomfort of child bearing.

As a lawyer who spent some years of my youth in the practice of criminal law, I’ve known some murderers, and I don’t have the visceral reaction to them that you seem to have. If I know someone is an abortionist, or see a character on TV portrayed as one, I’m much more likely to feel that sense of revulsion. After all, most people convicted of murder killed someone in an act of passion or lapse of judgment under circumstances of enormous pressure. Those who perform abortions, if not those who seek them, have made a cold calculation to engage in that activity, perhaps out of political conviction, but primarily out of the desire for material gain.

Knowing nothing else about a person than the crime for which they were convicted, I would entrust my child to someone with a murder conviction before I would one convicted of armed robbery or sex trafficking, not to mention someone who has been committed for violent psychotic episodes (although the latter holds no moral disapprobation).

And the young woman who gives birth to an unwanted child in a bathroom and then drowns or strangles that infant? I have the same sympathy for, and draw the same moral judgment upon, her as I do another who seeks and receives a late term abortion. If you recognize abortion as homicide, whether or not you would label it “murder”, and don’t see, and feel, the same moral equivalence between the two tragic young women, you really haven’t thought through, or absorbed the implications of, your own judgment.